Originally designed by Paul Barnes as headline type for the British magazine of fashion Harper’s & Queen, of Hearst Magazines UK, Austin is a loose revival of the typefaces cut by Richard Austin in the late 18th century.

Referencing Austin’s original creation, Paul Barnes turned up the contrast, tightened the spacing and came up with a fresh, new, bold and beautiful look for the constantly changing world of fashion.

Barnes himself describes the face as “a British Modern with the styling and sheen of New York in the 1970s.”

The Cyrillic version was designed in 2009 and 2016 by Ilya Ruderman (CTSM Fonts).

Ilya Ruderman, a type and graphic designer and teacher, lives and works in Moscow. He is a graduate of the Moscow State University of the Printing Arts (2002), where his graduation project was done under the supervision of Alexander Tarbeev. He has a MA degree in type design from the Type & Media program at the Royal Academy of Art in the Hague (2005). After completing the program, he returned to Moscow, where he has collaborated for a number of media: Kommersant, Afisha, Moskovskiye Novosti, Bolshoi Gorod and Men’s Health Russia. In 2005-2007 he was art director for Afisha’s city guidebooks, following which he was art director for RIA-Novosti, a news agency, for several years. Since 2007 he has also supervised the curriculum in type and typography at the British Higher School of Art and Design in Moscow. He has been very active as a consultant on Cyrillic since 2008. In 2014 he founded CSTM Fonts with Yury Ostromentsky.

Based in New York and London, Commercial Type is a joint venture between Paul Barnes and Christian Schwartz, who have collaborated since 2004 on various typeface projects, most notably the award winning Guardian Egyptian. The company publishes retail fonts developed by Barnes and Schwartz, their staff, and outside collaborators, and also represents the two and their team when they work together on type design projects. Following the redesign of The Guardian, the team headed by Mark Porter, including Barnes and Schwartz, was awarded the coveted Black Pencil by the D&AD. The team was also nominated for the Design Museum’s “Designer of the Year” prize. In September 2006, Barnes and Schwartz were named two of the 40 most influential designers under 40 in Wallpaper*.

Paul Barnes is a graphic designer and typographer. A graduate of Reading University, he moved to New York in the early 1990s, where he worked for Roger Black (Font Bureau). His projects in those years included the redesign of the magazines Newsweek, Esquire (US and British editions) and Foreign Affairs. In 1995 Barnes set up as an independent designer in London. With Peter Saville, he worked on a diverse array of works as identities for Givenchy; Original Modern, an undertaking that was part of the City of Manchester’s regional marketing plan, and album covers for Gay Dad, New Order and Electronic. He has worked for large corporations and publishers as a designer and consultant. These clients include The Guardian, Wallpaper*, GQ, frieze and Harper’s Bazaar. In 2004 Barnes and Christian Schwartz created the type system Guardian for The Guardian newspaper and typefaces for the Empire State Building and the Conde Nast magazine Portfolio.

In 2007 Barnes and Schwartz founded Commercial Type, which develops typefaces throughout the world. In 2006 Wallpaper* named Barnes one of the 40 most influential designers under the age of 40, and in 2007 The Guardian listed him as one of the 50 best British designers.